In most cases, you meet the aliens, they say their piece and then you move on, so the designers don't have to find ways to extend a nugget of personality into lots of individual quest designs and encounters or, worse, risk them becoming too human, as might occur if you were constantly hanging out with them. This inherently makes it easier for much of the odder stuff to be delivered in way that avoids dragging the jokes out too far, as with a race of pranksters or the sexy blue Syreen with their Penetrator spaceships. It helps that most of them don't actually do very much, consolidating most of their personality and quirks into one or two really big conversation tree driven dialogues. Star Control has some of the most memorable aliens ever put in a game, and still some of the best written. It's not just the game-y parts of the game that I've been replaying it for though, but the fantastic writing and universe design. Star Control 2 was the game I wanted to play since being disappointed by EGA Trek and captivated by Psi-5 Trading Company. You can't see me rubbing my hands together, but they're rubbing. It's an entire galaxy to explore, with few barriers to get in your way and a ton of freedom in how you go about saving Earth, what ships you acquire, and how much of a dick you are to enemies and allies alike. It's full of great moments like that, such as setting yourself up as an alien god and changing your new peoples' language just to screw with them, or travelling with an evil megalomaniac psychic who looks like Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but with all its points thrown into the Dominate discipline, avoiding the need for a stupid robot body. Yes, you can agree to save the universe, but only if the new order is called The Empire of Me. Such a shame they never made a third one. In Super Melee, all bets were off, as the great powers of the universe jousted and blasted away for hours and hours of shared-keyboard awesomeness. In the campaign, you only got to field what you'd persuaded people to give you. The inertialess UFOs of the Ariloulaee'lay, capable of confusing any opponent and harnessing the power of random luck for last minute escapes. The Mycon Podship, crawling around space at slug-speed, but with a homing missile to respect. The Spathi Eluder, armed with a rear-mounted cannon to dish out pain while still escaping. Star Control was the game I played first though, and the one that stuck - a sprawling, wonderfully written adventure campaign on one side, a fantastic Spacewar upgrade featuring a whole armada of ships to duel with on the other. Starflight was a fascinating, pioneering game too, with a truly amazing plot twist light-years beyond anything that anyone could have expected back in 1986. I know that a lot of purists would prefer more attention go to Starflight, Star Control's predecessor, and the game that's not had the spotlight as much in recent years due to the fan-remake Star Control II. it really is a wonderful game universe, isn't it? I've been playing it for a couple of reasons of late, partly for work and partly because it's one of the few games that will run on the Macbook Air I've been travelling with over the last week, and. It's why I loved Mass Effect so much, why I got on so well with Anachronox despite hating basically every actual mechanic it merely thought it understood from JRPGs, and why the likes of Eve and Elite Dangerous just aren't my mug of Romulan Ale.Īnd then of course, there's Star Control II. There aren't enough SF RPGs, and of those, there aren't enough that prioritise what I want from them - the feel of being in an impossible universe full of infinite possibilities, not simply being in a futuristic showroom with a lot of tech manuals.
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